Every year in September, just as the leaves start turning entrancing shades of gold and red, we start watching scary movies in our house. It’s just what you do. Clean up after supper, gather some blankets, snacks and beverages, then browse through DirecTV, Netflix, Prime, and Hulu, and if all else fails, resort to our bluray collection to find a scary movie to watch.

We love the classics–Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream–but honestly, who hasn’t seen them a million freakin’ times, right?

One of the phenomena that has convinced us our house is haunted is repeated electrical quirks and electronic anomalies. We’ve had lights turn themselves on, bulbs blow-out in spectacular flashes, as if to get our attention, and electronics that have responded to us, as if something is “answering” us. Sometimes it seems mischievous, like a practical joke. Last night was a good example.

Patrick Elliott is a troubled driver for an Uber-style rideshare service. After a moment of inattention leads to a violent traffic accident, Patrick flees the scene, leaving a motorcyclist dead on the side of the road, but soon, he finds himself haunted from beyond, and hunted by the law.

The last installment of this serial, a year and a half ago, was intended to be my last. Living in a haunted house is something we’ve come to accept since the presence here has never really felt malevolent or menacing. That’s not to say nothing has happened in the last few years–plenty of things have. After awhile, though, it starts to feel almost commonplace, and you stop paying so much attention.

The events I’ve written about in this serial took place over the course of about two years, from summer of 2007 to spring of 2009. As I said in my last post, I don’t have a Hollywood ending for this story. I’ll tell you what other people have said, what we think, and where we are now, and you can decide.

FM Paranormal came to the conclusion that my house has residual hauntings, which is like a playback of a previous event, a release of stored energy, and also intelligent spirit hauntings.

A nationally known psychic medium from Minneapolis told me the encounters might have been centered around the hallway and bathroom area because it’s a vortex. That’s where the elements come together. Earth, air, water, you know.

A caller to my radio show in 2008 said the black shapes my son saw in the house are shadow people. Author Heidi Hollis wrote a book on the subject of shadow people, described as “dark silhouettes with human shapes and profiles that flicker in and out of peripheral vision.” Some of the people she interviewed for her book reported the figures had attempted to “jump on their chest and choke them.” Exactly what shadow people are is open to debate, just like everything else in this supernatural arena. Some say ghosts, some say inter-dimensional travelers, and still others insist shadow people are demonic or otherwise evil entities.

I don’t know what more to say about these theories, except to say that I’m glad I don’t have to think about it too much anymore, because things are much better today than they were in 2009. In the two years that these things were happening, my wife and I were at all-time lows, personally and professionally, and we had a whole series of serious personal challenges, one after another; some unlucky and some just self-destructive. It almost destroyed our family, physically and economically. For reasons I’m still not clear about, our activity almost entirely disappeared for about a year around this time. Since that time, as we’ve continued to find our way back, the activity has been mercifully tame.

With the clarity that comes from years spent wondering and replaying events in my head, this is what I think.

The gray shape that looked over my shoulder while I was examining the abstract for my house has become a familiar sight to me over the years (to my wife too, but I won’t speak for her) and I’ve dubbed her the “Gray Lady.” In truth, she is a featureless humanoid shape, and I can’t tell you a lot about her, except that she’s always ready to startle you when you pass a doorway. I’ll have an armload of laundry, walk by the bedroom door, and she’ll be standing in there, just in the perfect spot for me to catch a glimpse of her as I walk by. She also likes to peek around stuff — the shower curtain or a doorjamb, for example, which is particularly creepy. I don’t know why I think it’s female, it’s just the impression I get. I still see her on a fairly regular basis and occasionally I hear her walking around on the floor, making the floorboards creak.

The little boy in blue that we saw on the day we moved in was around for awhile from 2007 to 2009 and was pretty scary for awhile. He was standing in my darkened bedroom one night with just his face protruding into the hallway, so when I walked by, I jumped like you wouldn’t believe. A face, three feet off the floor, staring at me from my bedroom door with what my friend Terry describes as “grudge eyes.” He had a habit of showing up when you least expect it and scaring the shit out of you, so it makes me happy to say I have not seen him in years.

I don’t know what they are so I’ll just call them things — these two things are the only manifestations we’ve seen on a repeated basis. Neither myself nor my wife have ever seen the black shapes my son reported six years ago, and he has never said anything about them since.

As for why my house might be haunted, I am similarly without answers. It was only built in 1950, which doesn’t strike me as particularly old for a haunted house. Does it have something to do with the fairgrounds that stood two blocks from here a century ago? Maybe. That could be why we captured some recordings that sounded like carousel music, I just can’t say for sure. Native people lived in this area going back to the end of Lake Agassiz seven millennia ago, plenty of time for the kind of tragedy that might result in a haunting of this spot on the prairie. Anything is possible, I suppose.

We still live in this house, which I think can be attributed to a number of things. First, the subsiding activity since 2009 has made it more tolerable to live here. Second, we’ve always viewed the occurrences with a skeptic’s eye, which makes it easier for my wife to simply chalk it up as “nothing” when she catches a glimpse of the gray lady in the living room, or to convince herself the cat is not staring intently at anything in that dark hallway behind her, he’s just being a cat. Finally, and most importantly, the reason I think we’re still here is because we’ve never really felt interacted with in a way that was meant to terrify us — the scares have been largely incidental and not particularly menacing.

We’ve learned to live with it in the last few years, even enjoy it at times. When something strange happens, the gray lady makes a convenient scapegoat.

I’ll end with the same words I used when I began:

In the course of my life, I’ve had a few run-ins I would characterize as supernatural or paranormal, but the experiences we would have when we bought our first home would leave no doubt in my mind about the reality of the supernatural. With Halloween not far off, I thought this story would be appropriate.

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My initial investigation of the strange happenings in my home was totally amateur, but I managed to come up with some evidence, including recordings of Electronic Voice Phenomena I mentioned in my last post. One bit of sound recorded under my son’s bed sounded like carousel music.

As I investigated the history of my home and my neighborhood, I discovered that my house is just two blocks from where the fairgrounds stood until 1967. As a matter of fact, the fairgrounds stood in this neighborhood for almost fifty years before my little house was even built.

Fargo Fairgrounds Grandstand, 1908

The whole area is re-developed now and home to Fargo North High School and some strip malls, but, as a kid who grew up smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of the North Dakota State Fair about six blocks from my house in Minot, I’m pretty sure this fairground in Fargo once filled the air of my neighborhood with carousel music accompanied by the laughter of children. What the connection would be to my house, I have no idea — it’s one hundred percent speculation, but it seemed like an uncanny coincidence.

I decided this was a job for the professionals, so in the spring of 2008, FM Paranormal staged an investigation of our home. Charles and Shawn from FM Paranormal assembled a crew of four and spent a night in our house. The investigation itself was fairly uneventful and, to my recollection, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. It was only upon examination of the recordings that the FM Paranormal guys uncovered apparent voices from beyond.

Charles and Shawn came to our studio one morning to announce their results. They were in the studio with us awaiting the end of a segment for about ten minutes before we went on the air, and we chatted for a bit over coffee. We opened our microphones to start our segment, and within one minute, our transmitter went off the air.

Listen to that, and the rest of the reveal below, broadcast on Y94 in Fargo when I was a morning host there. This recording includes all of the EVP (electronic voice phenomena) sounds captured in the house during their investigation. It’s about fourteen minutes long. Turn out the lights and turn up the volume.

For reference, the three members of this show are myself as the host, Megan, a talented Fargo announcer who has since moved on to another radio position, and Rat, also known as Terry Hinnenkamp, my co-author and photographer for the Ghosts of North Dakota series of coffee table books. He is still on this radio show today.

FM Paranormal’s verdict:“We believe there is enough evidence to call Troy’s house haunted. There seems to be both intelligent and residual hauntings here.” You can get the take, straight from FM Paranormal by visiting my case page at their website.

I find myself apologizing again because the video and photo evidence you hear them referencing in the audio above has been lost over the years due to a) poor filing on my part and b) the suspension of my old YouTube account (because radio deejays like to use popular music in their promotional videos) at a time when YouTube would just delete your entire account for copyright infringement. I really wish I still had the videos because they were compelling.

At any rate, I’m not trying to convince anyone, rather, attempting to tell this story in a straight-forward manner, as credibly as possible, in a way that leaves you entertained. These things happened.

So, what’s the conclusion then? What happens next? I wish I could tell you there was a big Hollywood ending on this story — that we discovered a cemetery under our house, or that someone who met an untimely end had unfinished business and was trying to communicate with us. I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of an ending to this story.

Would it intrigue you to know we still live in this house? Or that the activity we experienced has never entirely gone away?

In the next chapter, I’ll try to wrap it all up with as much clarity as I can.